Porteus

Here is a place for your projects which are not officially supported by the Porteus Team. For example: your own kernel patched with extra features; desktops not included in the standard ISO like Gnome; base modules that are different than the standard ISO, etc...

My impression with this DE is that it's in an early development stage, although it's labeled as version 1.x.x, which seems a little bit odd when you compare with other DEs that are much more mature and are labeled as 1.x.x (Mate) or even 0.x.x (LXQt). Lumina runs over Fluxbox, just like LXQt runs over Openbox, and it comes with a set of applications written in C++/Qt. Since both Lumina and LXQt are modern DEs written in C++/Qt and share the philosophy of being light, I can't talk about Lumina without comparing it to LXQt.

First of all, Lumina is very easy to compile for Porteus. Just need to have Qt and both xcb util and xcb image. LXQt, on the other hand, needs tons of dependencies, being a pain to set everything and compile with success. Also, LXQt generates a big and messy file structure, but Lumina generates such a small and very well-organized file structure.

Lumina seems as light as LXQt. The full module (with basically the same extra apps, like SMPlayer, Qmmp, ePDFViewer, etc) occupies 43 mb, which is essentially the same as LXQt -- both compiled with Qt 5.9.0. And the same thing for the after boot RAM consumption: Lumina 230 mb vs LXQt 232 mb. Both spend approximately the same time to boot. The difference is that LXQt is ahead in terms of usability, functionality and harmony. It worths mention that during the loading process Lumina shows an ugly splash screen telling that it's powered by tons of coffee...

Lumina's file manager (called Insight), for instance, is so raw that we can't even see an icon when dragging a file/folder. Insight also lacks ssh support and the ability to run as root. I don't understand how archiver integration works, since there's an auto-extract option, but no option to compress a file/folder.

Switching between running applications with ALT + TAB is another example of bad GUI feedback, since you can't see the list of running applications as you'd expect from this functionality. This kind of thing goes on and on.

Clicking on 'show desktop' for the second time doesn't restore windows. You can't drag a file/folder and restore a window by simply putting the cursor over a window in the panel. The basic window buttons (minimize, maximize, close) are inherited from Fluxbox, being very (!) ugly and I have no idea how to change them from inside Lumina session.

The shortcut manager lacks support for multimedia keys. And it seems that you can't create a custom action unless using the very complicated Fluxbox editor.

The panel can't be set with right click or drag 'n drop, although it's easy to customize it inside panel settings.

Finally, it seems to have some issues with GTK applications. If you try to open any Porteus bundled application, it takes a looong time to open.

To be honest I didn't invest much time with Lumina, but all I can say at the moment is that I simply don't feel that I should. I prefer to wait until it gets more mature. So here's my list of advantages/disadvantages:

Advantages:
-Easy to compile;
-Boots quickly;
-Consumes few machine resources;
-Comes with a simple text editor, calculator, archiver and media player;
-Built in applications are very straight to the point, so no bloatware feelings here;
-Very easy to customize themes/icons/panel;

Disadvantages:
-Looks very unpolished;
-Lacks a lot of functionalities;
-Lacks an image viewer;
-A lot of functionalities are very hard to understand;

i mostly agree with your assessment > nice but probly not worth spending too much time with..
being a bsd port might have something to do with it(good and bad)...
(and to be fair i dont like/need any DEs)
but its good to see effort in the lightweight qt5 direction to maybe offer more alternatives away from kde and gtk3...

I don't like KDE either. And GTK3, as we hear from almost everywhere, is not good. I presume that it's one of the reasons LXDE (GTK) is being converted to LXQt (Qt).

I didn't try the built-in mediaplayer. But I saw the GUI and it looks terrible, haha!

The ownership issue and missing qterminal are totally my fault. This Porteus module requires some fine tunning to be fair with the developers.

And finally, the auto-update after activating a module is really a mystery. I noticed when I first tried Lumina and I couldn't understand how it does that. Well, in this regard let's give Lumina some points

is a WM a DE?
sure, i use lxappearance, leafpad from lxde, xfburn from xfce and maybe openbox,tint2,spacefm could be called a 'diy' DE i suppose..

fulalas wrote:I don't like KDE either. And GTK3, as we hear from almost everywhere, is not good. I presume that it's one of the reasons LXDE (GTK) is being converted to LXQt (Qt).

i dont mind KDE, at aleast its configurable, but the all or nothing, more than i'll ever need thats under the hood....
with gtk3(and the alleged imminent demise of gtk2), a few of years back, there was a degree a discontent with the regular breakages of downstream projects with each update...
which sparked some moves to other(mainly qt5) toolkits... but from what i've seen the predicted wholesale conversion hasnt really happened...
and gtk3 seems to be somewhat stabilised lately...
at the moment, with say, a selection graphics editors and audio production tools installed you could easily end up with gtk2, gtk3, qt4, qt5, kdelibs/kf5, and fltk...

at the moment, with say, a selection graphics editors and audio production tools installed you could easily end up with gtk2, gtk3, qt4, qt5, kdelibs/kf5, and fltk...

Agreed. This drives me crazy!! We may very well still be using qt4 when qt6 hits!

That's why I still think that applications should have an option to come with all theirs dependencies built-in. The current approach of spreading everything to system folders opens the Padora's box of conflicts and entropy. Autodesk Maya, for instance, tries to avoid that, having all dependencies inside its folder -- the problem is that it only works for Fedora, so any other distro will probably require additional libs. I know this increases disk storage, but, hey, imagine a system where you can add/remove any application with 100% certain it will work and won't mess with your system. Plus: you wouldn't need dependency checkers inside package managers anymore. Open source developers being reasonable -> me dreaming

@fulalas
There is a strong package dependency analyzer that doesn't use a special tool nor special additional information.
It is not complete.
It is only for dynamic link libraries of an executable binary.
It is a "ldd" command.